Critical Essay
This page takes on two important questions about the critical essays you will write this semester in this course: what and what for; it also includes links to the assignment sheets for each essay. My goal is to make this page as useful to you as possible, so let me know if it can be improved. If anything is badly worded, unclear, or missing, please contact me with constructive criticisms and suggestions. Ditto for any questions you may have about any of the options listed below. Thanks.
What
Your critical essays are to be thesis-driven, analytical, and persuasive four-to-six-page papers. That is, they should not be simply a personal response to what you have read, or simply a statement of your opinions or assertion of your views, but should instead be organized to convince your readers to accept an argument you have developed in response to a specific question. You do not need to do outside research for these papers, although there's nothing stopping you from doing some. For graduate students, critical essays must be 6-9 pages and draw on outside research.
What For
So far this semester you've gotten good practice at noticing things about literary texts and asking questions of them; we've focused a lot in class on making connections between texts and identifying tensions within and between them, interpreting significant passages and image patterns, and considering various answers to questions that you all have posed as well as I. What you haven't had a chance to do yet is develop a sustained argument on a specific topic. The critical essays are your chances to do just that: to focus in on a particular topic or question that most interests you (this involves reviewing your notes and memories of the readings, as well as listserv contributions), to delve more deeply into specific readings (this involves choosing the readings that best allow you to address the topic or question you have chosen and focusing on those parts that seem most relevant to the topic), and to develop and support a sustained argument about the relation between the readings and the topic or question (this involves both critically analyzing the texts you have chosen to focus on and crafting a valid, persuasive argument). Doing these things will not only improve your skills in active, critical reading and analytical, persuasive writing, but it will also prepare you for the final research project.
The other major purpose of the critical essay is for me to indicate clearly what I see as the major questions or issues raised by the each unit in the course. The assignment sheets should provide you with something of a framework for understanding and reviewing each unit as a whole. Hence, it is highly recommended that you consider carefully each of the options given before settling on one on which to focus your critical essay. It's easy to miss the forest for the trees, especially when there were so many different "trees" we were analyzing each day, so seeing the range of questions I think are most important to consider when looking back on the unit can give you a new, better perspective on what we've read, as well as lay out possible directions for the final research project.
Links to Assignment Sheets
Remember, undergraduates only have to do two of the following three essays (graduate students have to do all); however, those undergraduates who do all three can have their lowest grade dropped.
ENGL 426: Major American Writers, Spring 2004
Created: 2/9/04 1:25 pm
Last modified: 4/7/04 5:49 pm